The Scientific Deception Of The New Atheists by Mohammad Hijab

New Atheists view Darwinism as a means to almost disprove the existence of God. For instance, Richard Dawkins details the central argument against the ‘God thesis’ in his book by summarising it into six points. He concludes by stating that if the argument is accepted ‘the factual premise of religion – the God hypothesis – is untenable. God almost certainly does not exist’ (Dawkins, 2006, p.156). Firstly, he claims that ‘one of the greatest challenges to the human intellect, over the centuries, has been to explain how the complex, improbable appearance of design arises’ and that ‘the natural temptation is to attribute the appearance of design to actual design itself.’ Elaborating further on his third and fourth points, Dawkins continues, ‘the temptation is a false one, because the designer hypothesis immediately raises the question of who designed the designer’. At this point Dawkins writes:

Darwin and his successors have shown how living creatures, with their spectacular statistical improbability and appearance of design, have evolved by slow, gradual degrees from simple beginnings. We can now safely say that the illusion of design in living creatures is just that – an illusion (Dawkins, 2006, p.157-8).

For Dawkins, Darwin ‘made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist’ (Dawkins, 1986, p.2). Dawkins admits that the world of physics has not resulted in an equivalent theory of Darwinian evolution, but believes it to be the responsibility of physicists to find such equivalent cosmological theories. To this end Dawkins states:

And although Darwinism may not be directly relevant to the inanimate world – cosmology for example – it raises our consciousness in areas outside its original territory of biology (Dawkins, 2006, p.113).

Therefore, according to Dawkins, it is Darwin and Darwin alone who allows atheists to articulate a cogent case against the argument from design – which is to Dawkins ‘in a nutshell the creationists’ favourite argument’ (Dawkins, 2006, p.113). Dawkins considers reference to God as superfluous as ‘God wouldn’t have to do anything at all’ for living beings to be the way they are (Dawkins, 2006, p.118). Hence, the first argument of the New Atheists is that Darwin effectively disproves the strongest evidence for a designer through evolution.

Dawkins’s arguments have been heavily refuted on philosophical grounds. Many such refutations have been made to Dawkins in public debates. For example, John Lennox has refuted the point that Darwinian evolution is incompatible with the God thesis by stating that ‘Dawkins is making a category mistake, he is confusing mechanism with agency’ (Fixed Point Foundation, 2017, 00:30:55). Aware of his own philosophical limitations, Dawkins admits that he is ‘not a philosopher and that will be obvious’ (The Archbishop of Canterbury, 2012, 00:35:52). Nevertheless, Dawkins’s conclusions are shared by some of his philosopher associates who consider Dawkins ‘a colleague and fellow in the cause’ (Grayling, 2014).

A.C. Grayling, who we observed associating himself with other ‘New Atheists’, makes similar arguments against ‘the God thesis’ to Dawkins’s, claiming, ‘moreover the design hypothesis is implausible because it purports to offer an explanation by invoking something itself unexplained’ (Grayling, 2013, p.77). Similar to Dawkins, Grayling spends little time engaging with the stock philosophical theistic contentions; namely reference to an ‘uncaused cause’ as being necessary to break the infinite regress, rather, he opts to invoke Darwinism as a fatal argument against the God thesis. Though Grayling is in agreement with much of Dawkins’s claims, his argument differs slightly. In referencing the fine tuning of the universal constants Dawkins rejects the idea of a designer as a reasonable recourse stating ‘he’s got to be at least complicated enough to do that’ (The Archbishop of Canterbury, 2012, 01:45:30).

Professor Anthony Kenny, who chaired the debate with Dawkins and the ex-Archbishop Rowan Williams, probed Dawkins by differentiating between complexity of structure and complexity of function. Kenny presented the example comparing an electric razor with a cut throat razor and stating that ‘the cut throat razor is more simple in design but has more complex powers than the electric razor’ to which Dawkins replied, ‘I really don’t see what you are saying’ as the Oxford university audience laughed in the background (The Archbishop of Canterbury, 2012, 01:56:40). Having dedicated two pages to the design argument and five to Thomas Aquinas’ five ways, it is safe to conclude that Dawkins’s philosophical contribution to academia regarding classic arguments has been virtually non-existent. Nevertheless, Dawkins’s arguments are contested to a point of ad hominem ridicule and degradation. To emphasise this point, Alister McGrath writes that when Dawkins comes to:

deal with anything to do with God he seems to enter a different world, it is a world of a schoolboy debating society, relying on rather heated, enthusiastic overstatements, spiced up with some striking oversimplifications and more than occasional misrepresentation (McGrath, 2007, p.9).

Such generalisations relate to Dawkins’s overt scientism, his disregard (or lack of awareness)

of philosophical and theological issues (theology being a subject that Dawkins does not appear to believe is ‘a subject at all’ (Dawkins, 2006, p.57). Professor Michael Ruse, an atheist himself, goes further than this stating:

I have written that The God Delusion made me ashamed to be an atheist and I meant it. Trying to understand how God could need no cause, Christians claim that God exists necessarily. I have taken the effort to try to understand what that means.

Dawkins and company are ignorant of such claims and positively contemptuous of those who even try to understand them, let alone believe them. Thus, like a first-year undergraduate, he can happily go around asking loudly, "What caused God?" as though he had made some momentous philosophical discovery (The Archbishop of Canterbury, 2009).

Dennett, much like Dawkins, ridicules and evades a full explication/refutation of the classical first cause arguments claiming:

Some people would much prefer the infinite regress of mysteries, apparently, but in this day and age the cost is prohibitive: you have to get yourself deceived (Dennett, 1995, p.26).

Perhaps the most critiqued aspect of the New Atheist approach is its progression from the natural sciences to religious philosophy. In this regard, McGrath states:

The real issue for me is how Dawkins proceeds from a Darwinian theory of evolution to a confident atheistic world-view which he preaches with messianic zeal and unassailable certainty (McGrath, 2006, p.10).

John Gray considers the New Atheist manipulation of science in attempting to disprove the ‘God hypothesis’ as:

A tedious re-run of a Victorian squabble between science and religion. But the idea that religion consists of a bunch of discredited theories is itself a discredited theory - a relic of the nineteenth-century philosophy positivism (Gray, 2018, p.9).

Gray identified similarities between these ideas and those of Auguste Comte in Catchechisme Positiviste (1852) (Gray, 2018, p.10). However, New Atheism transcends positivist assumptions of meaningless or metaphysical discourse as it aims to disprove religion using science. Such an approach has been criticised as it lacks careful distinction between metaphysical and methodological naturalism as noted by Massimo Pigliucci who writes:

The crucial point here is that a scientist is, essentially by definition, a methodological naturalist; however, she does not have any specific commitment (aside from her own metaphysical views) to philosophical naturalism. In other words, science does not necessarily entail atheism, which is the fundamentalist's fear (Pigliucci, 2006, p.2).

Pigliucci furthers this by adding:

There is, therefore, a good reason why many scientists are themselves religious , and it is a mistake (both in terms of public relations and from a philosophical standpoint)

to present the scientific worldview as if it necessarily leads to atheism. Science can neither afford, nor does it need, a head-on confrontation with religion (Pigliucci, 2006, p.2).

Elliott Sober echoes Pigliucci stating:

For some people, Newtonian theory and Darwinian theory suggest that there is no God. However, this is not what these theories say; it is a philosophical interpretation that requires additional premises (Sober, 2009, p.376).